Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Nature Calls

Elephant Trunk Hill

Our second full day in Guilin was passed in nature. At least, as close to nature as the Chinese get. Here, if you want to go hiking, you head to a national park, where you pay a hefty entry fee to trudge up man-made stone steps to the top of the hill, where another 50 tourists are snapping pictures of the pagoda or temple that stands on top. The whole thing has a very manufactured feel to it. Nonetheless, we had a fun time exploring Elephant Trunk Hill Park, where some university students followed us around to practice their English.

View of Guilin

Then we stopped by the Sun and Moon Pagodas and paid yet another expensive entry fee to walk to the top of each. I was expecting that each of the nine levels would have an interesting room or something, but each level was the same, offering nothing but a 360 degree terrace overlooking the lake. I, of course, realized this after about the 5th floor, but Andrew, being a man, had to reach the top, so we continued on, and then performed the same fruitless task on the second pagoda until we were convinced that we had, indeed, just wasted our money. Finally the strange lack of tourists in the pagodas made sense: there was simply nothing to see! However, since we were on vacation, we decided to make the best of it and chalked it up to a you-live-you-learn experience.

Sun Pagoda in the background

9th Floor

Our Chinese is bad, so ordering food in a restaurant can be really disastrous for us. Our usual M.O. is to randomly pick something off the menu and hope it's good, but on this trip we were determined to have some of the local specialties. This led us to only eat in restaurants with English menus, which were more expensive. Unfortunately, this price increase didn't always correlate to better quality, and we made many big mistakes in Guilin. For lunch that day we ordered snails and sauteed pumpkin, neither of which were appetizing. Moral of the story: escargot outside of France is disgusting.

Ewww

Our next stop was the Seven Stars National Park, where we hiked around pagodas and artificial caves. This park was pretty, but again, very manufactured.

Camel Hill (it's more llama-like, imo)

(Fake) waterfall

Andrew is interested in rocks, so we stopped into the Geology Museum, where we were greeted by an English-speaking tour guide who spent the next hour showing us around the museum before leading us to the "gift shop" and trying to convince us to spend $1,000s of dollars on rare rock formations. I resisted the urge to point out that they were just rocks, afterall, but some of them were quite pretty and should I ever need a rock museum of my own, I will possibly pay these exorbitant prices, but more likely go out into nature and root around for them myself. Our last stop in the park was a Buddhist temple, which was nestled against the cliff face and looked very peaceful.

Buddhist Temple

We made another attempt to commune with nature the following day. Having looked at the map the night before, Andrew's general plan was to get on a bus that left the city and get off when we saw something pretty. This plan worked pretty well, though we accidentally ended up at another national park, which had one short route to the "top" of the mountain, which was really only about 1/5 of the way up. However, there was a lovely lake nearby, and we paid a silly $2 to ride around on a bamboo raft for a while before hopping back on the bus and riding it to the end of the line. This deposited us in a suburban housing district that didn't look very promising.

Bamboo Rafts

We forged ahead, though, and found a path into the fields and toward the mountains. Strangely, there wasn't another person in sight, though there were many huts and shacks and even laundry hanging up, and I became a little uneasy so we left after not too long.

Off the beaten track

Back in the city, we finally lucked out for lunch and found a dumpling stand that gave us 15 huge steamed pork buns for about $1.50. We were in heaven!

We finished up our shopping, whereupon we discovered a knitting store! Chinese sizes are different than US, so I guessed at the size needles I needed and bought some lovely gray yarn for these Evenstar Gloves. Unfortunately, I guessed incorrectly, which led Andrew to run back and exchange them while I packed our bags for Shanghai.

Shopping Street

Around 5:oopm we boarded the train and spent the next 23 hours in relative comfort as we journeyed east. To be continued...

2 comments:

Okay, this post sounds way too negative. We had a great time in Guilin. It was cool to go to the top of the pagodas. There was a big gold buddha rocking the "shocker", but I couldn't get a picture because people were praying and that would have been really rude. The pagodas were connected by an underwater tunnel, which was pretty sweet, and had the weather been nicer, we would have had fantastic views of the city. Guilin was such a nice place that we felt we could live there. If you want to teach English in China, try for this area and you won't be disappointed. The time when we took the bus, we got off at the Reed-Flute cave park, which is supposed to be really cool with its well-lit stalactites and stalagmites, but we were warned that if you've seen a limestone cave before, this one's not very special, so we forwent? forgoed? the $15 entrance fee, instead paying $2 for the nice cruise around the lake, and the extra $4 to see the random industrial village in a gorgeous valley with chickens and vegetables. The country atmosphere really made us nostalgic for Mali. I had wanted to climb one of the hills because I could see a path going up it, but a dog barked at Nicole and she got scared. Someday I hope to go back and either hike along the river or take a kayak down it. We also totally shortchanged Yangshuo, which is supposed to be way better than what we saw, so go with good weather!